A Marchioness for the Beast

Description

Arabella Thorne is twenty-four, a confirmed spinster, and entirely content to be one. She has spent the best years of her youth at her mother’s bedside, and what she wants now is what the world has never quite known what to do with: a country cottage, a sketchbook, and the freedom to spend her afternoons studying the birds along a Derbyshire stream.

She does not expect to find anything else there.

She certainly does not expect the man on horseback who appears on the opposite bank one quiet afternoon, large and dark and visibly haunted, the kind of man the village whispers about and crosses streets to avoid. She knows who he must be. Everyone in Derbyshire knows. The mad marquess of Alendale Manor, returned from the Peninsular War a different man than the one who went, with a leg that no longer works the way it should and nightmares that wake the household.

She does not flinch from him. She does not avoid his gaze. She offers him a small, polite smile across thirty feet of water, the way one ordinary person greets another ordinary person on an ordinary afternoon.

It is the kindest thing anyone has done for Jasper Ainsworth in six long months.

Slowly, against every careful wall he has built since the war, the marquess begins to seek her out. Notes left with a returned sketchbook. The location of a rare bird he thought she would want to see. Quiet, deliberate gestures of a man who does not yet trust himself to ask for what he wants, finding ways to give her something instead.

And Arabella, who has been overlooked her whole life, begins to discover what it means to be seen.

But not everyone in the marquess’s life is pleased to see him return to the world. Someone has been watching the two of them from the edges of the wood, with a smile too pleasant and eyes too still. And when the danger Jasper survived in the Peninsula finds him again, much closer to home, it will not be the marquess who saves them both.